My printer (Canon Pixma IP5200R) is capable of printing up to 9.600 x 2.400 dpi. However in 10.04 CUPS with Gutenberg installed lets me choose not more than 600 dpi in the settings. Is there a way using only open source to improve print quality? I already tried editing the *.ppd files to include higher dpi values. This indeed let me choose these values when printing but there was no visible effect on the resolution of prints.

I've always thought the extreme numbers quoted by the printer manufacturers. At 10 to 40 dots per mm, you need a positioning accuracy of 25μm which strikes me as pretty precise for a consumer grade product. Does anybody know if these tolerances can really be met?
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mswNov 17 '10 at 14:55

1 Answer
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The only way to improve quality of the print is to do the research of reverse engineering the specific driver related instructions and updating the pixma foomatic driver. Currently we don't have any Canon documentation to work from to get printers working.

I have a Canon iP5000 and have a limit of 600dpi too. Unfortunately it's a lot of work to reverse engineer hardware protocols and we're not likely to get much support from Canon or Canonical in patching the holes.

I just am wondering who defined this limit of 600 dpi: CUPS or Canon? Setting a decent resolution should IMO be not such a great deal to involve reverse engineering. Interestingly, when printing from certain Flash sites (using Flash command to print) I was able to see a much higher resolution but it took ages to get the job done.
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TakkatNov 17 '10 at 11:26

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The resolution limit is probably due to the driver really only supporting the iP4000, but the same type of driver works for most PIXMA printers with a bit a hacking. Extra support for fine resolution probably wasn't high on the priority list for the foomatic driver developer. CUPS also has nothing to do with drivers, it's just the printing system, same one as MacOSX.
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Martin Owens -doctormo-Nov 17 '10 at 12:17

For the iP4000 that would be 4.800 x 1.200 dpi :S
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TakkatNov 17 '10 at 13:26